Identity
by cardiogod
Summary: For the second time in her life, the second time in the last year, people were looking at her like she was a grieving widow."


Title: Identity

Author: Cardiogod

Rating: PG

Word Count:

Characters: Brennan, Booth/Brennan

Spoilers: Post-ep for "The End in the Beginning."

Summary: "For the second time in her life, the second time in the last year, people were looking at her like she was a grieving widow."

Disclaimer: FOX and their people own Bones. I'm just borrowing them for fun.

Author's Note: Beta-ed only by me, so I take full responsibility for all mistakes and anything that may seem OOC. Still learning these characters, figure out what makes them tick. This turned out to be much longer and much different than I expected, to say the least.

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For the second time in her life, the second time in the last year, people were looking at her like she was a grieving widow.

The first time, it had been sudden, unexpected. A shot meant for her, blood seeping through her desperate fingers, an endless ride in the ambulance, clinging to his hand, the white, sterile walls of the hospital sucking the life out of him, out of both of them. She blinked once and he was dead, gone, the too-young doctor looking at her with kind eyes that, like hers, had seen too much death, and apologizing for her loss, for not being able to save her partner.

It had been quick, less than 24 hours between the last horrible chord of "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" and the first beats of empty silence after the doctor has made his pronouncement. Angela had been the first to cry, but she was not the one receiving soft-spoken condolences or the looks of pity ordinarily reserved for the wife who had lost her husband, not the anthropologist who had lost her partner.

They sent her another FBI agent to work, but she sent him home after the first day. He was young, he was handsome, he seemed capable, and he had dimples when he smiled, but he wasn't Booth, so he was inadequate. She hadn't gone back out into the field. She'd found comfort in the lab, in her work, surrounding herself with death so that she could forget it. But she couldn't, not really. It was fast, too fast, and she remembers thinking that one should be given time for this, that it was unfair to lose so much in a moment, a gunshot, a heartbeat.

This time she had plenty of warning and she still thinks it's unfair, even though she knows better than most how integral to life death is, even though, rationally, she knew he would die eventually, as would she.

She tries to remind herself that he's not dead yet, but it's hard to believe when she looks at him lying here, eyes closed, hardly breathing, and silent but for the rhythmic beats of the EKG machine. Angela had been in, Cam, Hodgins, Sweets. They had looked at him and looked at her perched next to him and had assured her that everything would be okay, even though they didn't believe it. She had smiled darkly when she had realized Angela's words were false, noting her shifty eyes and minutely tense body language. He had taught her that- or had tried to, at any rate- how to tell truth from lie, and in that moment, she wished he hadn't so that she could take comfort in the hollow words she so fervently wanted to be true.

They look at her now like they did then, and it bothers her, but she doesn't say anything.

On the third day of her vigil, Angela brings her a change of clothes and her laptop so that she can continue working on her next novel while she waits. So she sits and loses herself in a world where things are right, where they are solving crimes together, where they are happy and affectionate and so blissfully whole that she almost wants to cry. She creates a world where he is healthy and virile and moving above her and inside her and she thinks for a moment about the eternal love he'd promised her she'd one day believe in. She wonders if she believes now, five days too late.

Her fictional world is her outlet, it always has been, and it dulls the sharp edge of the pain she feels when she looks at him, lying there motionless. She wants to tell him to hang on, to open his eyes, to look at her the way he did when he corrected her figures of speech, full of laughter and warmth.

She hates herself a little for being so emotional, but this always happens when she write. It always happens when her partner is on the brink of death too, but she is not so willing to admit that. Last year she didn't have enough time to adjust to the idea of his death, this year she has too much.

She imagines work, examining bones in the lab without him hovering over her should, telling her to speak in English rather than the scientific jargon that he didn't understand. She tries to picture herself in the diner without him there trying to cajole her into eating some of the fruit pie he knew she didn't really like. Fruit should not be cooked, she'd told him once, and he'd scoffed at her. She tries to think of her life without his scoff, his laugh, his gentle teasing, and she is dismayed when she can't. She wonders when he became important in her life, when she stopped thinking of him as the FBI guy and started calling him her partner, when he stopped being her partner and became her friend, when friend became inadequate and was replaced by something that she could never find words for.

The monitor beeps softly and he chest rises and falls, his breaths barely discernable. She is glad that he is not on a respirator, if only because she knows that she would be the one to pull the plug if the time came. She isn't sure if it would be because she is the one closest to him or because she is the only one who won't break down, the one rational enough to push the button and watch him die. She is uncomfortable with both options.

The doctors think he will wake up, but she knows that the chances decrease with every day, every hour. Still, she will not give up on him because he has never given up on her, and so she stays.

If it wasn't medically unlikely, she could swear her heart stops in her chest when she sees him looking at her, hears his voice, raspy and worn. She doesn't catch the moment when he first opens his eyes because her own are focused on the computer screen, deleting the too-personal truth she'd written there. She is at his side immediately and he is speaking of a dream but she doesn't hear him, she just looks at him, talking, breathing, looking at her, returning her clasp on his hand.

She refrains from launching herself into his arms, from getting too close and she is almost amazed at the depth of her self-preservation. But he is alive and awake and she is joyful and nothing else matters.

She hears three words that again threaten to steal her breath, and she suddenly understands what Angela means when she talks about her stomach turning over at crime scenes. Stomachs don't turn, she'd told her friends, it's scientifically impossible for an organ to move of its' own volition. But now, watching him watch her with unknowing eyes, she understands.

She doesn't answer his question, doesn't move. Who is she? How is she supposed to answer that? She is Dr. Temperance Brennan. She was born Joy Keenan. She is a forensic anthropologist, the best in the country, if not the world. She works at the Jeffersonian and as a consultant to the FBI. She is a best-selling novelist. She is the girl whose parents abandoned her when she was 15. She is Angela's best friend, Russ's sister. She is his friend, his partner, his Bones. How does she redefine for him who she is when she doesn't even know herself?

She doesn't know how many moments have passed since he asked his question. He is looking at her, examining her. He reaches a hand to her down-turned chin and urges her to look at him. She fights the tears she knows will come- it's one of the things she dislikes about herself, the ease with which she cries, especially in front of him- and she reaches for the call button.

Doctors and nurses pour in and she leaves them to do their work, to solve their puzzles. There is nothing she can do for him now, no way she can help him. She hates the uselessness, she's not used to it. She won't be able to help him until he's dead, a skeleton laid out on a cold steel table in the lab, and even then, she will only be able to find out how he died, she won't be able to bring him back.

She hears the click of the door and the hospital staff exits his room as quickly as they'd entered. The doctor approaches her and his gazes makes her uneasy, knowing he assigns her a higher place in Booths' life than she actually has.

"Ms. Brennan," he begins, but she cuts him off quickly.

"Dr. Brennan." Her title is important, it defines her, makes her who she is. Or, at least, she thinks it does, but she's fuzzy on that aspect of identity, on what makes her her.

"Dr Brennan, I understand that you may be concerned, given what you've just heard, but I want to assure you that I don't think you have anything to worry about. Mr. Booth-"

"Agent Booth." His title is important too.

"Agent Booth has just woken from a four day coma following invasive brain surgery and he's so pumped full of Demerol for the pain that I'm surprised he could articulate anything at all. A little disorientation is to be expected."

She nods. It is logical, it makes sense. She likes things that make sense because nothing inside of her does.

When she returns to his bedside, he is sleeping again and she feels a combination of afraid and relieved. She doesn't know how to deal with this now. It isn't in any text book she's read- sure she knows about amnesia and head trauma and the effects of major surgery, but the science doesn't tell you how to deal with it, how to look at someone who doesn't know you and make them remember.

She wants him to remember everything- the constant bickering in the car, ice skating after his concussion, him rescuing her from the Gravedigger and then her rescuing him in turn, lunches at the diner and drinks at the bar, baby Andy, kissing under the mistletoe on orders from puckish Caroline Julian, watching Max and Parker bonding over a soda bottle and a handful of mints, everything. There are so many little moments that pop into her head, moments she hadn't known were important enough to remember, and the sadness she feels at the notion that he will remember none of it is overwhelming.

She has been in control her whole adult life. She took control the minute she realized that her family had gone somewhere and wasn't coming back for her. She became a scientist, she worked with facts and logic and rationality.

She chose anthropology because she liked being able to observe the human condition without actually having to participate in it. There was power in observation that there wasn't in participation and she liked it, had quickly grown accustomed to it. She discovered it in the twelfth grade when she accompanied her then best friend, Suzanne, to an audition for the school play and walked out with a role herself, which provided the first outlet for the pain of her parents leaving. (She had told that to him once, after he asked why she was so good undercover.) She saw the world through the eyes of a character, saw another environment, another culture, another society. She could feel and not feel at the same time.

It wasn't such a large jump from The Crucible to the biology lab, and an even shorter leap to anthropology in college, which gave her the exposure to culture that she found in theatre and the hard facts, undisputable and certain, that she loved about science. It was a clean way to live, a way that would keep her both involved and distant, and would give her the control that had become a necessary presence in her life.

She watches human beings without being one of them and she thinks it's easier that way. It's a simple equation, really. If you don't get involved, you don't get hurt (not seriously, anyway), and you don't get left if you don't allow yourself to be there in the first place. It makes sense to her and she chooses science because science can explain it in a way that sounds better, stronger, than "I'm scared."

But he changed her. He came into her life with his faith and his psychology and his "Brain and heart, Bones" and she started to feel her iron-fisted grip on control slip into his warm smiles and guy hugs that didn't make her feeling anything like a guy.

She is no longer merely an observer, she realizes as she sits beside him, holding his hand. It would be impossible for her to not feel this pain, the pain at the thought of losing him to either death or amnesia, because he is too close to her, too important, too much intertwined in her life. She is involved with him, a participant in his life, as he is in hers. She feels all of the pain and not as much of the pleasure that human involvement provokes and she thinks that, when he comes back to her, she is going to remedy that because it is futile to try to protect herself from him, to protect her heart. She keeps him at arms length because she doesn't want to relinquish control, to give him power over her, because the dissolution of their partnership if things were to go wrong would undoubtedly cause her pain. Because, logically, if you don't love someone, they cannot hurt you.

But there is a flaw in her logic, and she can see it now.

She again ponders his question. Who is she?

She is Dr. Temperance Brennan. But she is more than that, too.

When he wakes up the next time and asks her who she is, she will tell him that she is Temperance Brennan, a person who loves him (even though she tried not to). She doesn't want to think about what will happen if he doesn't remember then, if he has to start from scratch and relearn who he is, who they are. She doesn't want to lose the memories, and she wonders if they really exist if she is the only one who knows of them.

He would be proud of her, she thinks as she blinks back the tears that have been pooling in her eyes for days, with all of this feeling stuff.

She feels his hand twitch under hers and she immediately straightens, searching his face for any signs of cognizance. He opens his eyes, hazy and unfocusing. She pleads with him silently and when his gaze locks on her, she can't breathe because there is something so familiar about it.

After a moment, an eternity to her, he begins to smile, slow and gentle and disbelieving.

"I know who you are."

And, like the first time she heard those words from his lips, she embraces him and lets the tears fall.


End file.
